Support

Home » Blog » How the recruitment industry can ride the wave of digital disruption

How the recruitment industry can ride the wave of digital disruption

Date posted:

11 December 2018

Author:

Alex Ayers

From remote working to BYOD policies, digital evolution means the offices of today are in many ways unrecognisable from the workplaces of years gone by. But this doesn’t just affect the employee experience. It’s also had a significant impact on how recruiters work. Which means senior IT decision makers always need to have one eye on new trends – and the other on what their organisations need to do to ride the waves of digital disruption.

Some of these trends are easier to surf than others. Take targeted ads, for example. Historically, this sort of marketing has predominantly been used by eCommerce businesses, to chase potential buyers on their journey around the web. Now targeted ads are being used by recruiters, to ensure the right role can get in front of the right candidate. Likewise, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is being used when recruiters write job descriptions, in order to help candidates find the roles that fit their skill sets.

This is a very different way of doing things, especially when you think it wasn’t all that long ago recruiters were mainly placing job adverts in newspapers. But it isn’t particularly difficult for the recruitment industry to adapt to changes like this. It’s just a matter of enabling staff with the right tools and delivering the right training.

Take a look at how Reed updated its IT strategy to manage digital change

Take a look at how Reed updated its IT strategy to manage digital change

Video: the digital trend disrupting recruitment

But identifying video – or indeed, any other new trend – as an area for investment isn’t the only thing CIOs need to think about. To make sure their organisations can thrive moving forwards, decision makers in the recruitment sector also need to think about the infrastructure supporting these developments.

Getting ready to ride the wave of digital disruption

It’s all well and good deciding to invest in new video conferencing platforms. Recruitment companies certainly won’t struggle to find reliable software. But in order to use these platforms effectively, recruitment organisations must make sure they have robust data services in place. Fail to do this, and it won’t matter how keen recruiters are to use platforms like video conferencing – they simply won’t be able to do it in an effective way.

Reed Specialist Recruitment faced this very problem. Like many large enterprises, Reed had been relying on legacy WAN infrastructure. With an increasing appetite for bandwidth hungry applications and solutions like video, Head of IT Services, Sean Whetstone, knew that Reed’s 122 countrywide offices needed an ultra-reliable network to bring its services into the future. Gamma was able to provide this, designing and supplying a fully-managed WAN service built around our UK-wide, next-generation fibre network. Not only did this increase network capacity and resilience, it also provided an estimated £450,000 annual saving on telephony, too.

The willingness to invest in network services means Reed will never face restrictions on their usage of platforms like video interviewing. And this holds true for any digitally disruptive trend in the recruitment industry moving forward. Whatever the top-level technology is, it’s likely this is also going to operate over the internet, which means CIOs need to consider their network services as an essential part of their digital strategy. Because without robust network services, recruitment organisations won’t just be digitally disrupted – they’ll risk falling behind altogether.